Honestly i don’t understand what all the hoopla is about? With etcher i don’t see any ad stuff? Almost every other link you click on has some sort of analytics or tracking. I use etcher for one reason… because it works. Yes there are others that work too but i like etcher. Don’t have an issue with it. It always works on Linux. So I’m using it. 
there is also isousb ( gtk only )
very useful as it propose only mountpoint USB
and apply a DD command
Well, B. Etcher has and will have fans who don’t care (e.g. “I have nothing to hide”), and dd it’s a command-line tool that may seem unfriendly to some 
, yet so powerfull. In my humble opinion, in a way it teaches humility…
I was a little curious so I searched GitHub for bootable usb:
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Sorry to hear Etcher is having issues. The potion of your post I quoted was because I opened Gparted yesterday to check disk space on my drives and was shocked to see that I went from about 45 gigs used to twice that, and I know I hadn’t installed enough to do that. At least I thought so till I saw that portion of your post and remembered I installed Emby Theater which is an Electron app. As for Etcher itself I’ve always wondered why it was so huge. As of this post I will be removing both Etcher and Emby Theater. Thanks for the heads up, much appreciated.
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Yes etcher is bloated but it just works for most, But i don’t see all the other problems, it simply advertises electron projects using raspberry PI some of the bloat is its a cross platform software, and do you really think it would be in the apple store if it was spyware.
saying that i stopped using it and use popsicle to support Lollix
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Just curious since I created my USB drive with Balena Etcher, is it possible for the program to inject spyware into the ISO?
Now its getting to a point of silliness
Not likely, it’s more about respecting privacy during program use than that.
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Same here. Created EOS with Balena Etcher. I did it on Windows and saw that my firewall was blocking a lot from Balena Etcher. I have Simplewall in Windows as a firewall. I’m going to stop using Balena Etcher. I used the latest Balena Etcher.
MX Linux has an appimage for making bootable usb. I’ve used it a couple of times in the past. It worked rather well.
It is possible. However, this is not what Balena Etcher is doing. There is no evidence of them ever having done anything malicious.
The issues witch Etcher only apply to privacy conscious people. They clearly don’t care much about user privacy. If things like Google/Facebook tracking don’t matter to you, then keeping using it. It works fine.
What Balena Etcher does is no worse than what most commercial websites do. However, since it happens in an application, your adblockers won’t block it.
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So it’s very bad 
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I guess at some point, if you’re that paranoid, the question you have to ask yourself is - why are you even on the internet?
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Who told you i am?! 
It’s your imagination playing…
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For the same reasons everyone else is on the internet?
I mean, most commercial websites have quite a lot of tracking on them. Wanting to avoid that shouldn’t imply paranoia. I think very few people realize just how pervasive this tracking is and what people are doing with their data.
It is easy to minimize or downplay privacy concerns but as more of this becomes public people are going to start to realize they have lost something they can never get back.
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I’m really paranoid when it comes to things like this.
I do not like it! 
I know I run Windows sometimes. It’s a homemade ISO with everything stripped down.
I block everything via network (DNS) or firewall!
I know I was reading recently about some of the Google metrics built into chrome. They even go as far as timing how long your mouse pointer stays in place on the screen.
I know I watched the Cambridge analytica documentary on Netflix I think it was. We’re being tracked pretty hard.
I’m really not thrilled about covid keeping kids home from school and giving everyone Chromebooks.
They can learn to advertise specifically to someone from birth to death now.
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Who needs people anyway?! 
Definitely not corporations 
I see, thanks 
Plus it is happening in your own computer rather than in a browser.